How Resident Evil Speedruners Save Time By Stair-Skating

Every second counts when you’re trying a world record, which means players tend to discover some bizarre tricks to shave off time. Resident Evil speedrunners have been mining tricks for years, but they’re gaining new life with the re-release. The most entertaining one I’ve discovered is what some call “stair skating”.

This particular instance of stair skating is demonstrated by speedrunner Carcinogen.

“Any time I run up and down stairs, you’ll see a glitchy stair animation,” he told me. “Stair skating allows for 1.5x faster movement on stairs by mashing ‘run’ with tank controls. The faster you mash, the faster you go. Viewers on my twitch channel named it ‘stair skating.’”

You’ll remember Carcinogen from earlier this week, as he demonstrated how easy it was to break leaderboards for Resident Evil by tweaking values for how the game measures time.

Tapping a button as fast as possible isn’t all there to stair skating, however. Carcinogen has developed specific hand techniques for the major gaming controllers, to ensure you’re getting the maximum number of taps out of your hand. He personally prefers playing on PlayStation.

Goofy? Yes. Effective? Absolutely. Annoying to pull off over and over again? Probably.

Carcinogen recently uploaded a bunch of other clever tricks for Resident Evil, including a way to skip the reload animation for firing a shotgun, which also requires a unique hand configuration:

What’s impressive about these and other techniques discovered by speedrunners is how they’re born from desperation. Once a game has been supposedly “mastered”, it’s time to get creative.